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The right way to make perfect saleable art

Jonas Lundh, “one of southern Sweden’s most active exhibiting painters”, attempted to create the most optimised work of art to sell “at an art fair”.

In an interview printed in the Electronic Superhighway catalogue, Lundh explains his Studio Practice Project: “I downloaded recent auction results and worked out the right way to make the perfect pieces, which ended up being oil paintings, 140 x 100 cm, the most sellable size at that time….. two of which sold, so my thesis was sort of proven..”

Lundh hired assistants and wrote them a 300 page guidebook; they then produced the works under a contract which forbade the assistants from claiming authorship, sharing any information about the works, removing them, or using material for their own productions. Lundh himself, with an ‘advisory board’, decided which were ‘approved’ and was entitled to destroy the rest.

The process was treated as an installation: the public were able to see live footage of it from surveillance cameras.